Posts on Technology

I have recently developed a tool, mapgen, which generates interactive maps with customizable markers. It takes a YAML file containing map settings and marker data as input and generates an HTML page as output. This page contains all JavaScript and CSS code it needs inlined into it, so it can be directly opened in a web browser (without the need for a web server), shared with others (e.g. via e-mail), or added to an existing webpage through an <iframe> element. Below is an example of a simple map generated with mapgen:

The contents of the YAML file used as input to generate this map can be found here. If you would like to see additional examples or read the tool's documentation, see its README file.

Feedback and feature requests are of course welcome. Have fun! :-)

NMEA is a standard which is widely used for representing GPS position information in textual form. This standard defines a set of one-line sentences which are independent from each other and contain information such as position, velocity and time.

Given the broad range of applications which are capable of understanding NMEA data, I decided to create a tool for manually drawing a path on a map representing an object or person moving around while carrying a GPS device which gives them their current position at regular time intervals (e.g. once every second). This path can then be stored as an NMEA file, i.e., as a text file containing NMEA sentences which represent the position information for all points in the path.

The tool is called NMEA Generator. I hope you will put it to good use, and should you have any questions, please don't hesitate to write a comment below or send me an e-mail. Enjoy it! :-)

I have recently released the first version of a new project called easy-geoip: an easy-to-install and easy-to-use IP geolocation server. It works with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

With easy-geoip, you can get IP geolocation data in either JSON or plain text format. To see what the output looks like for your IP address, check out my own running instance of easy-geoip. To get the output as plain text data, use this link instead.

Download and installation instructions are available here. Enjoy! :-)